“It is very hard to call this investigation a truly international one,” Russia’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin says

MOSCOW, September 10. /ITAR-TASS/. Russia’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin is critical of what has been done so far in terms of an international probe into last summer’s crash of a Malaysian Boeing jet liner in Ukraine.

Churkin was speaking in an interview on Russia’s round-the-clock TV news channel Rossiya-24 shortly after the Dutch Security Council published its preliminary findings regarding the causes of the disaster.

“It is very hard to call this investigation a truly international one,” Churkin said. “Many questions have been left unanswered. There are too many omissions.

“It all looks very strange. The text of the report first mentions the grounds on which the investigation was held, the rules of the ICAO, the agreement the Netherlands had concluded with Ukraine by which the Netherlands assumed the leading role in conducting this investigation, but for some reason it does not say a word about the UN Security Council’s resolution,” Churkin said, adding that the document he was referring to stressed the need for a full scrupulous and independent international investigation.

“One has to state that a truly international investigation has not been held to this day,” Churkin stated.

Moscow does not think a special United Nations mission in Ukraine is necessary, he said.

“Sometimes the UN, its secretary-general or the UN Security Council establish a certain special political mission. There’s no such mission in Ukraine,” Churkin said on the Rossiya 24 TV channel.

“There are monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Ukraine, and let them work,” the diplomat said. “We do not see any necessity to create another special UN mission on the territory of Ukraine.

"The report says another three commercial airliners were cruising in the vicinity at the moment of tragedy but it does not say anything if Ukrainian warplanes were there, too," Churkin said. "Our Defense Ministry said at least one military jet might have been there and eyewitnesses also say they saw one or two jets in the sky."